


Vishakha

by flamethrower



Series: Awaken the Stars [2]
Category: Awaken the Stars Series - Jer Keene
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-21 03:03:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15548166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/pseuds/flamethrower
Summary: Serving tours in Vietnam was a guaranteed way to come down with a firm case of PTSD even if things wentwell. If they went bad...Yeah. Things went bad.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm having a fundraiser so I can move into a rental property in Florida (Yes, I got out of the hellscape!) and one of the things I said I would do is that I would place completed chapters of Vishakha on AO3 for every goal met. One of those goals was met today, so: here's a chapter.
> 
> Of course, I didn't say it would be a NICE chapter. If you've served, please be aware that this could be triggering as fuck.

March 22nd 1975

Saigon, Republic of Vietnam

 

Jason Merrill has been coordinating combat missions in Vietnam since 1957. When the action picked up in 1964, he got off a plane, put boots down on the soil, and never left. Now it’s ten years on and he’s still staring down the barrel of an ongoing clusterfuck of a war.

He knows some men who gave up on religion because of this place, but he still believes in a higher power. The silver cross around his neck is paired with his wife’s Star of David, which Helen ordered him to keep until he goes home. He’s certain there is more to life and the universe besides spending a few decades on this spinning ball of dirt…but after everything he’s seen in Vietnam, Jason has come to the conclusion that when it comes to war, God fucks off and leaves them to sort this shit out for themselves.

Despite that belief, Jason looks at the piece of paper in his hand one more time, hoping a miracle happened in the last five minutes to change the words. No such luck.

He finds the man he’s looking for sitting on a bench in front of SF HQ. He’s already kitted up for the field, properly outfitted for the dry season that’s about to fall on them like a sack of broken bricks. The only thing remaining seems to involve finishing off a brown cigarra that perfumes the air with good tobacco.

“I have shit news that you’re not going to like, Agent.”

“Please don’t fucking call me that, General. It sounds like so much pretentious shit.”

Jason smiles. There has never been anything pretentious about Éoghan Kellagh-Ambrus, even when the Oxford accent he picked up in Britain as a kid made him sound like he was born and raised west of London. “It does, yeah. Too bad they never gave you crazy assholes real titles.”

Kellagh-Ambrus takes the piece of paper when Jason holds it out. “They’re thinking of calling us Specialists, what with the CIA having such warm and fuzzy reputations back home at the moment. I don’t think that’s much of an improvement.”

“No, that just makes you sound like a field grunt,” Jason agrees, and waits for the explosion.

“WHAT THE SHIT IS THIS?”

“That is someone a lot higher up in the food chain than either of us telling you to accompany a contracted team on the ground to a suspected POW camp.” Jason raises an eyebrow as Kellagh-Ambrus crumbles up the ball of paper and sets it on fire by subjecting it to a sharp glare. “Aren’t you under orders not to do that in public?”

“Are you going to be reporting it?”

Jason snorts. “No.”

Kellagh-Ambrus scowls at the front gates. “What’s the point of sending me out with a group of contractors? I have a village of allies to check on, General. The NVA is moving into the region, and they need a babysitter the ARVN can’t provide, and the contractors can probably take care of themselves.”

“I don’t think it’s about doing anyone any _good_ at all. I think it’s…” Jason hesitates. “PR is definitely not the right term. I think there is someone who wants reassurances that our teams on the ground are behaving themselves, and if they get a POW rescue out of the opportunity…”

“That’s still PR. It’s just the secret bullshit kind.” Kellagh-Ambrus stands up and resettles his pack. “Do I have time to hit east of Biên Hòa before I meet up with this group of contractors?”

Jason shakes his head. "Last intelligence had them already booking it south from Binh Duong. If you head out now, you'll be able to meet them north of Giang Điền. The suspected POW camp is supposed to be in the bush further south, somewhere east of An Phước."

“I can be there in eight hours. Send them an ETA of dawn for me.” Kellagh-Ambrus stubs the cigarra out beneath his boot before tossing it into a planter. The former flowerpot has a few dead branches pointing forlornly at the sky, and is drowning in a hell of a lot of cigarette butts. “This is bullshit, Jason. They don’t need me. Our unarmed allies _do_.”

“Yeah, Kid. I know.” Jason plasters an innocent look onto his face when Kellagh-Ambrus glances up at him in mild offense. “There is an upside to the trip.”

“There can’t possibly be an upside to this.”

“Sure there is,” Jason says, and tells him.

Kellagh-Ambrus stares at him in disbelief. “Getting shot by an angry Māori is not an upside!”

“He probably won’t shoot you,” Jason reassures him, secretly enjoying the opportunity to make certain that two stubborn assholes speak to each other again. “Look. I’ve got reassurance from higher-ups that one of the other teams on the ground running near Biên Hòa will check on that village. They’ll be fine, Agent.”

“Fine.” Kellagh-Ambrus shoves another cigarra into his mouth and lights it without bothering to use a match. “Do you believe them, General?”

“I have to,” Jason replies. He’s tired and worn down, a feeling that’s been chasing him for the last few years. He’s fifty-eight and he damned well knows it. “I have to believe it.”

Kellagh-Ambrus nods. “Good seeing you again, General,” he says, and sets off toward the gates.

 

*          *          *          *

 

“Where the fuck are we?” Redgrave asks for the fifth time in the last half-hour.

“Still in Đồng Nai, just like we were an hour ago.” Takei smacks Redgrave on the back of his helmet. “And to save you the trouble, we’ll still be in Đồng Nai a half-hour from now.”

“Stop hitting me, ya damned Jap!” Redgrave retorts, shoving his helmet back into place.

“The redneck’s flirting with me again, Boss!” Takei sings out.

“Knock it off, or I’ll shoot you both and leave your bodies out here to fucking rot.”

“That’s harsh, Boss,” Redgrave mutters. “Just wanted to know where we were.”

“Đồng Nai Province,” Django drawls. “For the last few hours. Probably for the next few days, too. Stop bitching about it and just enjoy the scenery, Redgrave.”

Hundley falls into step with Django. “We’ve got palm trees, heat, mosquitos, and your ugly mugs. Plenty to enjoy,” he says to Redgrave, and then lowers his voice. “We’re not fucking lost, are we, Boss?”

“No, we’re not fuckin’ lost.” Thanks to the famous Jones-Richards documents, Django knows exactly where they are—Trảng Bom, east of Biên Hòa. The hand-drawn maps are a hell of a lot more useful than standard issue, covering terrain stretching from Laos down to Saigon. Those maps have saved their asses so often he’s lost count, and whenever they’re clear for an evening, Jones makes certain they’re up to date.

“We’re still heading in the right direction,” Django says. “South. The worst problem we should face is avoiding all the traffic heading into Biên Hòa.”

Hundley lets out a derisive snort. “Staging ground. You know they’re going for Saigon.”

Django nods. "That's kind of obvious, Hundley."

They listened over the radio a few days ago as Ban Mê Thuột fell for the second time. Losing the city meant losing the entirety of South Vietnam’s II Corps TZ with it. Now the VCs and the NVA are flooding III Corps using the second tactical zone’s captured highways, on their way to scoring one hell of a victory, and it’s pissing Django off because they can’t do a damned thing about it. They can’t engage with the enemy units moving through the area. It isn’t even an order over the radio—it’s the numbers. Django has forty-three men with no support behind them. They don’t have the firepower to deal with this shit. The ARVN is stuck handling it on their own, and without U.S. military money, they’re running out of the supplies you need to fight a damned war.

In an act of pure stupidity that has to be born of politics, the ARVN are currently engaged in a last-ditch defense of Da Nang, and they don’t have much more than spit and defiance to do it with. If Da Nang falls, ARVN is going to lose a lot of men and munitions with it. They won’t have shit left to hold the eastern line.

No one’s said anything, but Django knows it’s true: they have already lost this war. Just because the fighting isn’t over with doesn’t mean he can’t read the writing on the wall. The Republic of Vietnam doesn’t have the money, supplies, or manpower to defend this country anymore. They don’t even have much for morale, not when the economy tanked after the majority of the U.S. military presence left in ’73. The entire stack of cards is crashing down hard. If the capital falls, everyone who’s still fighting on the south side is fucked.

Django and his men are still on the ground to do the only thing they can, the job they chose: they’re hunting for POWs and MIAs while the U.S. still has a foothold in Saigon. South of the province’s main east-west highway is a rumored POW camp, and that’s where they’re going.

Finding it would be a hell of a lot easier if they weren’t trying to avoid pretty much everyone and their fucking uncle. Đồng Nai is crawling with Việt Cộng and North Vietnamese soldiers. They’re heading west, squads of men on their own or detachments accompanying rolling heavy artillery. It’s hard to make progress when Django’s four teams have to keep finding cover as they wait for enemy militants to move on by, all of them on their way to set up shop around Saigon.

Saigon is going to fall. He just doesn’t know _when_. Not yet.

“Boss!”

Django turned around to find Hicks jogging up the line to his position. “What’s the word?”

“Radio is still busted,” Hicks reports, wiping his face with a shredded bandana before he shoves it back into his pocket. “We can hear them, but they can’t hear us.”

“Same shit, then,” Django says, unsurprised.

“Not quite.” Hicks makes a sour face. “We’re getting a spook ride-along.”

“We’re getting a fucking what?” Moseley asks, wandering over after he finishes watering a tree. “Did I hear that right?”

“Yeah, you heard right.” Hicks slaps the carbine on the M-60 in annoyance. “We have coordinates to meet a spook who’s going with us to the POW camp. Top man’s orders, si—uh, Whetū. Boss.”

“If I didn’t think your fucking brains would explode, we’d be calling each other by our first names.” Django grins mercilessly when Hicks, Moseley, and Hundley all wince at the idea. “What are the coordinates, Hicks?”

“About an hour south of here if we continue to make good time. Thick brush in the area, at least,” Hicks answers. “We’ll be able to hide out and take a breather for the night. Spook’s ETA is set around dawn.”

They set up camp that evening in a depression that isn’t natural, not the way the sides are dug in. Hundley suspects it’s an old collapsed VC tunnel section, but it’s been long enough that the rainy seasons have washed away all the evidence. Django doesn’t care what it used to be. What matters is that it’s deep enough that no one is going to find the platoon unless someone comes along with a chopper-mounted searchlight.

Django tries to rest when he’s not on watch, but it’s hard to fall asleep. He’s too keyed up, too aware of everything around him—like he’s expecting something to happen. Trouble is, he’s felt this way a lot over the last ten years. Something is _always_ about to happen when you’re fighting a ground war.

The morning dawns hot, and it’s only going to get hotter. Django lifts his arm and notes that it’s 05:35, a half-hour until true sunrise. “Someone find me a C-ration that isn’t fucking Spam,” he says. Moseley tosses him an M-1 for turkey loaf, which really isn’t much of an improvement.

Takei tilts his head up as the sun breaks through the tree line. “Well. It’s dawn.”

Django rolls his eyes. “We can fucking see that, Takei.”

“Hey, I’m just enjoying the fact that our spook is late,” Takei replies, blowing jets of smoke from his nose while tapping his cigarette into an empty D-2 can. “Always good to have something to lord over the CIA.”

“Dumbass, you ran SOG missions with us,” Moseley says, amused. “Technically, we’re all fuckin’ spooks.”

“No, we’re idiots,” Hicks counters, fiddling with the safety on his M-60. It’s getting to be a bad nervous habit, but since Hicks hasn’t slipped enough to forget his trigger discipline, Django is ignoring it. For now.

“We’ll give the spook another half-hour,” Django decides. “We already know where we’re going, and we’re only a few hours out from our target zone. Thirty minutes isn’t going to make much of a difference.”

Moseley sets his watch. “Half-hour. Got it, Boss. Hey, Brown! How’s your breakfast?”

Brown turns around to glare at Moseley. “I’m a vegetarian staring down a load of meat rations. How the fuck do you think it’s going?”

Django tenses up at the sound of movement in the brush. His hearing was good even before he signed up for temporary insanity; the program just made it better.

He signals his men, a finger over his lips as he puts his other hand in the air, raising one finger. All quiet; one potential target.

They drop what they’re doing to pass the signal along, stub out cigarettes, put C-ration cans aside, and flick off the safeties on M60s or the AK-47s taken from downed NVA squads they couldn’t avoid a few months back. Django has to admit that the AKs are still damned pretty, but he prefers his .30 caliber M2. Besides, the 47 was replaced by the AKM in 1959. If Django ever decides he has to have a Russian weapon, he’s going for the improved model with lighter weight and thirty extra bullets.

“Target’s making a lot of noise,” Hundley murmurs.

“Một người đàn ông một mình. Ngài muốn chúng ta nghe,” Sadka says. “Probably our spook, Boss,” he adds in English.

“I’ll greet him, then. You guys cover my ass. If he raises a weapon, fucking shoot him.” Django waits for nods and muttered affirms before climbing up out of the pit.

He hears him before he sees him. The sound of the man’s voice makes Django’s heart lurch painfully in his chest.

“GODDAMMIT! I know there is a fucking unit hiding in this clusterfuck of a jungle. Don’t make me hunt your asses down or I’ll make you eat a brick of C-4!”

Django debates for a moment before he flips the safety on and shoulders his M2. He once trusted this man with his life. Time to see if that’s still true.

Their spook finally breaks through the last layer of brush hiding the pit. He’s Django’s height, fully kitted out like a proper soldier trying to deal with Vietnam in the middle of hell season. He’s wearing an M2 slung across his back, not the reconfigured M16 or an M60.

“Éoghan.” Django swallows, and has to rack his brain to remember the damned ident-confirm line. “Let me hear you sing it, English.”

“Fuck you, and your little dog, too.” Kellagh-Ambrus smiles at Django as he removes a boonie hat, revealing that his hair is a grown out, flaming, tangled mess that is trying to stick to the full beard on his face. “Hi, Django.”

Django stares at a man he hasn’t seen since 1956. Kellagh-Ambrus looks like he’s aged maybe five years, tops. Nice to know that slow aging shit wasn’t just Django’s lucky draw.

He’s still feeling gut-punched when he yells, “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, KELLAGH-AMBRUS!”

Kellagh-Ambrus’s smile widens into a smartass grin. “Aw, you missed me!”

“If I shoot you, I won’t fucking miss! I haven’t seen you in eighteen years, motherfucker. Where the hell have you been?”

Kellagh-Ambrus’s smile wilts. “Let’s just—can we discuss that later? We have a lot of ground to cover in a hurry. I need to hoof it the fuck back north after we confirm or disprove this POW camp’s existence. Oh, and please tell your men to stop pointing their rifles at my head.”

Django gives up. “It’s all right, assholes,” he calls back to the others. “Kellagh-Ambrus isn’t CIA, he’s DoD—unless you started batting for a different team?” he asks hopefully.

“No such luck,” Kellagh-Ambrus answers as Django’s forty-three men emerge from the pit, trees, and surrounding bush. “Hi there,” Kellagh-Ambrus says to the platoon. “I’m Kellagh-Ambrus, a department agent working out of the DoD. Nice to meet another batch of lunatics.”

“Phil Moseley,” Moseley introduces himself after a moment of awkward silence. “Used to be a captain. Now I’m a contractor for the State Department until this shit wraps up.”

“Wise choice,” Kellagh-Ambrus replies. “I heard that’s what a number of SF did to be able to stay on the ground.”

Casey shrugs. “Hey, it beats going home to be a potato farmer.”

“Why the fuck did command send a spook to join us?” Hundley bites out, scowling.

“Motherfucking politics.” Kellagh-Ambrus pulls out a cigarra and lights it—with a match, thankfully, not by his other favorite method. “They want a confirm for POW searches from someone who is still legally allowed to be here, and that would be me. Oh, and General Merrill wanted me to confirm that a certain colonel is still alive.”

Django frowns. “If you’re confirming that, you can tell the general that our radio’s broken. We’re receiving but not sending. You did bring a fucking radio, right?”

Kellagh-Ambrus gives him a wry look. “Nope. You idiots weren’t talking to anyone, and even if I needed to call in an evac, no one is going to come along and rescue my ass. Why carry the extra weight?”

“To keep up with what the NVA and the VCs are doing,” Takei points out bitterly. “They took Ban Mê Thuột a few days ago. From what we’ve been hearing, Da Nang isn’t falling to the enemy so much as the city’s just falling apart as the civvies book it out of there.”

“Well, fuck.” Kellagh-Ambrus releases a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. “Let’s go, then. Coordinates put us east of An Phước. I’d like to kill someone today.”

“Changed my mind. I like him,” Hicks says, and Moseley snorts out a laugh.

Django gets his platoon of crazy-ass volunteers up and moving, giving their campsite one last sweep while everyone splits up for the trek south. He wants the chance to think, and the more he dwells on it, the more he realizes that with Kellagh-Ambrus…something’s wrong. It isn’t just the kid’s language, which is finally Army-levels of foul. There is rage glittering in that man’s eyes, and Django is going to watch and wait for the right time to find out why.

He judges that his timing’s good after about three hours of humping through the brush. Kellagh-Ambrus is angrily smoking his way through a third cigarra, but at least he’s sensible enough to put the extinguished butts in his pocket instead of littering them on the ground like a screaming sign of “An American was here!” Took Django months to break the idiots in his battalion of that stupid habit. Every time someone new cycled in, the lesson started over again. Pain in the ass.

Django signals for Moseley to wander on ahead. Moseley glances at Kellagh-Ambrus, nods, and quickens his pace until he’s walking with Russell.

“What’s wrong, Kid?”

“Fucking brass.” Kellagh-Ambrus offers Django a drag on the cigarra; Django declines. He didn’t realize he was quitting smoking last year when he started trading his ration cigarette packs for supplies, but after a while he realized he just wasn’t interested anymore.

“The brass is always up to dumb shit,” Django says. “This is something else.”

Kellagh-Ambrus frowns. “More like it’s a lot of something else. I’ve been on the ground since 1964.”

“Yeah?” Django is surprised by that. “Same here.” He wonders if Jason knew.

Django wonders if he’s as angry as Kellagh-Ambrus, and just can’t feel it anymore.

“It’s a bullshit decision that may get people killed. There’s a village in the north of this province, Nihn Chu,” Kellagh-Ambrus explains. “They’re known allies to the ARVN and anyone who supports the Republic of Vietnam. Good people.” He hesitates. “I had a…a bad feeling.”

Django just nods. “Go on.”

“I think Ninh Chu is in danger. I was geared up to head out there when I received orders from some fucker with the authority to override the decision, so here I am out with you,” Kellagh-Ambrus says. “Jason told me that those same superiors in the brass promised that the village would receive a protection detail, or an escort to Saigon if things turn sour in the area.”

“But you’re still worried.” It isn’t a guess. It may have been eighteen years, but Django knows how this man thinks.

Kellagh-Ambrus stubs out the half-smoked cigarra and pockets it. “I’m worried about this entire damned country, Whetū. But yes, I’m worried about this village in particular. We don’t have a lot of allies who sided with us before that Vietnamization shit. We owe them. Besides, it’s just good tactical sense to look after the people who are still willing to support us.”

Django thinks about his gut feeling that Saigon is going to fall, and likely take the entire country down with it. “Yeah. I get that.”

“Sir—dammit. Boss!” Redgrave calls, waving his hand in the air. “Lovejoy up ahead has eyes on a camp!”

“Excellent. Moseley, Redgrave—you get Lovejoy and the rest of the forward team together. I want eyes on that camp in ten minutes. Go,” Django orders. Redgrave and Moseley scatter into the bush. “Are you playing with us, or staying out of it?”

Kellagh-Ambrus shakes his head. “This is your team. You know how to work together, but I don’t know how to work with you. I’ll take up a sniper position and drop anyone your men don’t see coming when you raid the camp.”

“Huh. You got smart in the last eighteen years,” Django says in surprise. Kellagh-Ambrus wouldn’t have volunteered for distance killing back in the old days, either.

Kellagh-Ambrus cracks a grin. “I can’t be that smart. I’m still in Vietnam.”

Fifteen minutes later, Django is on the outer edge of a camp’s sentry line, lowering his scope in surprise. “I’ll be damned. For once, they sent us useful intelligence.”

“We’ve got POWs?” Moseley asks eagerly. He still has no word on his missing brother, and every camp they find gets his hopes up. “It’s not just a VC camp?”

“Yeah.” Lovejoy spits on the ground. “It’s a VC camp with POWs, all right, but they’re not our boys. They’re just ARVN.”

“They’re still POWs,” Django says in a sharp voice, irritated by Lovejoy’s attitude. “That means we take out the sentries, rescue the prisoners, and then burn this place to the fucking ground.”

“Yes, sir,” Lovejoy mutters, recognizing the rebuke. He just doesn’t like it. Too fucking bad.

 “Hundley, you’re on Rat duty,” Django continues. “Take your boys and be ready to scout for tunnels the moment you hear the all-clear. Redgrave, get your sergeants ready to treat POWs. Starvation and infections are the usual culprits, so collect the antibiotics we’ve got left. After we sweep the camp, I want your team scouting for rations to feed these poor bastards.”

“Got it, Boss,” Redgrave and Hundley echo each other. “I’ll make certain we’re looking for extra medical gear, too,” Redgrave adds.

“Hicks, see if these fuckers have a working portable radio, or the parts to fix ours. If they don’t, find their heavy setup and try to report in. If the brass is getting antsy enough to want a separate affirm on what we’re doing, they need to hear from us.”

“I’ll do my best,” Hicks says, but he looks doubtful. Django isn’t too hopeful on that front, either. The VCs tend not to have the best communications equipment.

“Jones, give me the terrain.”

“The land to the west is complete slogging shit,” Jones answers without looking up from one of his maps. “We can men on the north and south sides to keep any VCs from escaping that way, but I wouldn’t send anyone through that terrain to make a run for the camp. The east side’s all right, though. If no one’s mowed it down with heavy artillery fire, there’s good cover on that side.”

“Understood. Moseley, you’re leading first team, north side. Takei, you’re on the south with second team. I’m taking the third team and coming in from the east. Fourth team is on mixed sentry and sniper duty. I don’t want anyone slipping through the net. Questions?” Django asks, and hears none. His men all know their jobs, and they’ve been doing them together for a long time. “Move out. Pincer in fifteen minutes at 12:20. Don’t be late to the party.”

In the end, it’s almost a milk run but for the bodies on the ground when they’re done. They close in on the camp from three sides and discover that the VC’s sentry line is shit. Their infantry is fierce, but they’re not well-trained. Django almost hates to kill the poor bastards, but these VCs were still holding prisoners—and from the looks of it, not treating them well.

Django fought in WWII on the European front, and he saw things he’d like to forget forever. The Nazis did a lot of bad fucking shit, but they leaned towards treating military POWs with respect, fed them and housed them decently enough. It's blatantly obvious that these ARVN men are starving to death, and it reminds Django far too much of the concentration camps his unit began stumbling over in 1945. That sets off a deep, dark rage that’s been seething below the surface of his thoughts for a long time now. He makes certain the order is repeated through the ranks: unless a soldier surrenders, put them down with extreme prejudice.

Kellagh-Ambrus isn’t the only angry motherfucker on the ground, and it’s not just Django. His men sweep the camp with swift, merciless efficiency, putting down soldiers who would rather die than surrender. By 12:45, his teams are signaling that the camp is clean.

The only Vietnamese left standing are the ARVN POWs, men who are weeping with joy and thanking them in both French and Vietnamese. The POWs heard the news on the Việt Cộng radios. They know that II Corps is down and III Corps is flooded with the enemy. These men had already given up hope of rescue and were waiting with peaceful resignation for death. Getting an American rescue, they say, is hard to believe—it’s too much like an impossible dream.

“You didn’t get rescued by Americans,” Django says dryly. “We were never here.”

The word “secret” gets passed along to their fifteen rescued POWs in three different languages. Then their highest-ranking soldier, Hue Pham, salutes Django. “We understand,” he says in stilted English. “Americans were never here—but _we_ will not forget.”

Django reaches out and shakes Pham’s hand. He can feel every single knobby bone beneath a fragile layer of flesh, but Pham refuses to be defeated, standing tall and defiant.

“Neither will we, Captain.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

“Their radio is shit,” Hicks reports in a frustrated growl. “It doesn’t have the range to make it to Saigon—they must be broadcasting to someone within a ten-mile range, because that’s the limit. Parts aren’t compatible, either.”

“Damn—” Django flinches when the explosives go off, making the ground rumble beneath their feet. Hundley and his Rats are cheering, so they must have nailed a nest. “Good try, Hicks. Go join the others in scouting out supplies to give to our new ARVN friends. They’re going to need them to make the trip home.”

“Home?” Hicks repeats, raising an eyebrow. “Not back to their base assignments?”

“If their base assignments are in the first or second tactical zone, they don’t have a fucking base,” Django replies. “Third zone isn’t doing so well, either. Yeah, we’re sending them home. There’s just enough of a language gap that they might misunderstand me, so make certain Sakda is specific. Those men have families who will want to know they’re safe, and…” Fuck. “And they may need to hide from the NVA.”

Hicks grimaces and pulls out the cigarette he’d tucked behind his ear, popping it into his mouth. “This is complete shit, Boss.” He holds up the flame from his engraved lighter until the cigarette catches and burns with a deep ember glow. Django has seen some crude shit carved into the side of a Zippo, but he likes Hicks’s choice: _I Dream in Signals that Rise Above the Noise._

“I know it is. Tell Sakda to guilt trip the stubborn bastards if they try to insist that they’re in fighting shape,” Django says. Hicks flicks ash from the end of his cigarette, nods, and goes to find Sakda.

Django knows he’s tired, but maybe he truly is that jaded, too. He hears the whizz of a bullet in the air and its impact an inch from his foot before he hears the rifle report. He takes a step back and lifts his rifle, but a body topples from the camp’s observation tower just as there is a distant _pop-pop_ of two shots from an M2. The body lands with a sickening crunch a few meters away.

“Thanks, Kid,” Django murmurs, and then raises his voice. “WHO THE FUCK WAS IN CHARGE OF CLEARING THAT OBSERVATION TOWER?”

“Stewart, you stupid fuck!” Moseley hollers. “You told me that nest was empty!”

“It _was_ fucking empty!” Stewart yells back. “Damned gook must have been monkey-climbing beneath it!”

“Stewart, you say that word again, and you really will be MIA!” Django shouts. Stewart pales and holds up both hands in a surrender-gesture.

Takei starts digging through the would-be assassin’s pockets, whistling as he turns up an American-made grenade. “Some fuckers never learn, do they Boss?”

Django catches the grenade when Takei tosses it over. It’s old, but it might still blow something up. He’ll hand it off to demolitions; they’ve been bellyaching about running low on explosives. “Stewart’s seen too many losses. It’s getting to him, Takei.”

Maybe he’ll send Stewart back to Saigon once they’ve cleared all of their objectives. If Stewart is forgetting to think of the NVA and VCs as people, he’s going to slip one day and forget that the ARVN and their other South Vietnamese allies are people, too.

Kellagh-Ambrus hikes in from the bush after another hour. “You’re clear,” he reports to Django, as if he doesn’t outrank Django’s military ass simply by being department. “Your snipers on the west side picked off three VCs trying to run for it. No one is inbound, either. Did any of them surrender?”

Django shakes his head. “Too stubborn. Too scared, maybe. We have fifteen ARVNs, though,” he says as Moseley, Takei, Hundley, Redgrave, Hicks, and Jones wander over for debrief. “Redgrave’s team is prepping them for travel. Then…then I don’t know.” He has an idea, but it’s not one he wants to voice.

“I can’t stay,” Kellagh-Ambrus says, which gives Django a cold sensation down his back. “If things are souring as quickly as I’m starting to suspect, then three hundred South Vietnamese civilians need an escort to Saigon. Ninh Chu is a bit less than ten miles north of here. I’ve got enough daylight to get there before dark.”

Redgrave and Moseley look at each other. “Do those ARVN need babysitters if we leave them armed?” Moseley asks.

Redgrave shrugs. “We should arm them anyway, no matter where they go afterwards, but they’re actually good to travel as long as they take it slow. They don’t have any open wounds, infections, or broken bones that would keep them off their feet. They have a lot of dead men to steal shoes from, too. I was going to report in to the boss here that we might not be able to keep the bastards in place overnight. After Sakda told them about the ARVN losing zone two, most of them want to leave right now.”

“My boys are setting this place up to burn as we speak,” Hundley reports, grinning.

“That leaves us with a free afternoon,” Moseley says.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Kellagh-Ambrus asks, baffled.

“Look, Agent Long-Ass-Name.” Hundley gives Kellagh-Ambrus an impatient look. “Most of us have been pulling shit detail for a while now. Jobs that don’t mean fuck-all to anyone. This POW camp is the first one we’ve found in six months, and they weren’t even our boys. We’ve only accounted for seven American MIA soldiers since February of ’73.”

“What the man’s saying is that you’re about to head off by yourself to look after a group of people that helped look after us,” Jones adds. “We’ve been talking it over during cleanup. If the boss okays it, we want to go with you.”

“I’ve seen so much shit, man.” Moseley spits on the ground. “So much that sometimes I wonder about God, and my Momma’d beat my ass if she knew I had those kinds of doubts.”

“We couldn’t help a lot of these people the way they deserve,” Takei mutters. “So we’ll help who we can.”

Kellagh-Ambrus yanks another brown cigarra out of his pocket and lights it after Jones offers a lighter. “You don’t have other orders?”

Hicks puts on a bland face. “Radio’s broken, and no one’s put out any chatter meant for us. Besides, it’s not like ten miles is going to matter all that much. We’ll still be in our operating zone.”

“I see. Whetū?” Kellagh-Ambrus looks at Django. “You’re lead. It’s your call.”

It isn’t even a decision; it’s a relief. “We know everything is falling apart,” Django says. “If we save one village, just one, before that happens? I’ll call it good after ten years of this shit.”

“Fuck yeah!” Redgrave grins. “I’ll get Sakda to interpret and prep the ARVN boys to move out.”

Jones and Moseley pound their fists together. “Spread the word, my man.”

“Damn straight, cracker,” Moseley responds. Jones snorts and heads for the largest cluster of their men to pass on their new plans for the afternoon.

The POWs are supplied, clothed, and already on their way west by the time Django’s platoon is ready to head north again. Django checks his watch and looks at Kellagh-Ambrus. “You know the sun sets at eighteen hundred. Three hours from now.”

Kellagh-Ambrus smirks at him. “You’re SF. Are you going to whine about humping it ten miles north in two hours?”

“Oh, so it’s a fucking challenge, huh?” Django smiles. “You know there are patrols on the move who aren’t friendly.”

“What, your platoon doesn’t know how to split into smaller teams and meet up a quarter-mile south of the village? Damn, that’s some shoddy-ass training.”

“You are such a shit, Kid.”

Moseley passes the challenge along to the others: ten miles in two hours in full gear. Django hears a few moans and groans, but for the most part everyone seems game to make the attempt.

“Good thing we’re all used to the heat,” Redgrave says, tying his bandana around his face before he drops his hat back onto his balding head.

Dunn shoves Redgrave from behind. “Thanks for the reminder, asshole. I’d almost brainwashed myself into not noticing it anymore.”

They split into their four teams, eleven men each, and move out through the bush. Kellagh-Ambrus doesn’t stick with any one team. He scouts ahead alone, crisscrossing back and forth between the teams before he’ll drop back on occasion to report upcoming obstacles.

The third time Kellagh-Ambrus drops into place next to Django, he’s still got something on his mind. “Why are you so fucking angry? You heard my reasons. I want to hear yours.”

Django snorts. “Being on the ground here for over ten years isn’t enough?”

“It’s a pretty good start, is what,” Kellagh-Ambrus replies. “You’re twitchy about something else and trying not to dwell.”

“Sometimes I really hate the fucking department’s shit.” Django scowls. “When I get my people out of here, even the ones who stay military…we don’t have a battalion to go home to. They canned 1st Group last June.”

“I heard. Thought it was a stupid decision.” Kellagh-Ambrus glances at him. “Brief didn’t say. You’re all 1st Group, aren’t you?”

“1st Group, 1st Battalion.” Django tries to smile. “I try to look at it as the Army firing my ass, Éoghan. They just didn’t want to do it in person. Can’t imagine why.”

Kellagh-Ambrus shrugs. “Seems like they’re only smart lately if it involves saving their own asses.”

“Kid, that has been Army brass standard since I enlisted in 1944.”

They have to stop twice, hiding from NVA detachments beneath overgrown palm fronds, behind collapsed buildings, and in one memorable instance, underneath a fucking tank with its tread sheared off. Someone left the engine rumbling even though it’s been abandoned. Django can’t hear anything but a damned whine in his ears for a half-hour after that.

Each time they’re stopped, he checks his watch. When Kellagh-Ambrus is on their six, Django notices he’s watching the clock, too. If there are potential VCs in the area, they can’t afford to arrive at this village in the dark. Django wants daylight when he meets these people in Ninh Chu. It’s already past seventeen-hundred hours, and they’re running out of daylight.

They’re a quarter-mile out from the village when he can smell it. Smoke. Burning wood. Fuel oil and fucking laundry detergent.

“Someone’s dropped napalm,” Hernandez mutters, his eyes tracking the smoke rising into the sky. “What the fuck? We haven’t dropped napalm since Ford stopped the bombing runs.”

“Doesn’t matter. That’s still fucking napalm.” Kellagh-Ambrus’s lips are drawn back from his teeth in a snarl. “There is only one village in this area.”

“Fuck a damned rabid duck,” Django says. “You don’t think—”

Kellagh-Ambrus just _looks_ at him, and Django knows. Yes, the kid does think that.

At the end of an exhausting, tense journey, they don’t find a village waiting for them. Ninh Chu is nothing but a smoking ruin. There’s a hell of a large crater in the ground where the village must have been storing munitions for the ARVN.

“Oh, God,” Kellagh-Ambrus whispers. “I was wrong. It wasn’t a ground assault. Napalm from above. Oh, God.”

Casey jogs up to Django, smelling like fresh vomit. Django doesn’t blame him. He feels like finding a bush and doing the same. “Sir, we’re checking the bodies we can find, but none of them are military. No sentry line. No weapons. Scouts aren’t reporting that anyone left the site after the napalm run.”

“They lied.” Kellagh-Ambrus’s voice sounds like crackling static. “Three hundred people in danger, and they fucking _lied_.”

“They never sent anyone.” Hicks rubs his hands over his face, smearing red earth across one cheek. “Fuck, man. What the fuck?”

Django hears weapons fire, but when he tries to order everyone to cover, no words come out. It suddenly hurts to breathe, and his left leg is trying to tell him that fire ants are chowing down on his thigh.

“DJANGO!”

Django gets knocked to the side, rolling in the char, ash, and dirt with Kellagh-Ambrus before they jolt to a halt against the burnt wall of the nearest hooch. The impact makes him swear aloud from how much it fucking _hurts_.

“Django!” Kellagh-Ambrus, wide-eyed, trying to get his attention.

Django presses his right hand to his side, trying to figure out why he feels so bruised. It’s actually a surprise to lift his hand and find his palm covered in blood. “Fucking shot?”

“Three times, because you didn’t duck!” Kellagh-Ambrus retorts. He’s somehow found the time to ditch his pack, get out a field med-kit, and start pressing bandages against three different bullet wounds. Left thigh, a through-and through. Right side, same thing. Django doesn’t taste blood, so it’s not a hit on his lungs. Right arm, right into the meat of his bicep. The bullet lodged in place but can’t stay—he is not letting a chunk of metal heal into his skin, thanks.

Kellagh-Ambrus must have read his mind, maybe literally. He gets his knife, gives Django enough time to grit his teeth, and then uses the knife tip to pry out a flattened bit of lead. Django breathes out one long, muted growl, pain that he isn’t going to voice for the fuckers who shot him. Then it’s over with as the bullet falls and disappears into the dirt.

Kellagh-Ambrus presses a bandage over the wound; time and reality both feel like they snap back into place. “What the hell happened, Éoghan?” Django asks while Kellagh-Ambrus tapes the bandage into place. They’re surrounded by gunfire, a hell of a lot of rounds coming into the village just as fast as it’s being fired out.

“Ambush,” Kellagh-Ambrus answers curtly. “They must have been waiting for us. I didn’t sense a damned thing. Did you?”

“No.” Django sits up and grabs his rifle, flexing his right hand to be certain he can aim and shoot without reorienting to his left side. “And I should have.”

“We both should have known.” Kellagh-Ambrus glances up over the edge of a fallen wall and then ducks back down as someone takes a shot at him. “They’re either the luckiest motherfuckers in existence, or someone’s hiding them.”

“I CAN’T SEE A FUCKING ONE OF THEM!” Brown shouts from a few burnt houses down. “ANYONE GOT EYES?”

“GUONG’S DOWN!” Stewart shouts back.

“NOT WHAT I FUCKING ASKED, GODDAMMIT!”

Django frowns and picks up a length of old, yellowing piece of bamboo from the mess of debris. He lifts it above his head, out of cover. It’s immediately shot out of his hand. “We can’t see them, but they can sure as hell see us.”

“Looks like it.” Kellagh-Ambrus retrieves his pack and rifle. “Brown is right. Except for what’s incoming, it’s like there is nothing out there at all.”

Django clenches his jaw. This isn’t a standard ambush. The VCs targeted command and the medics, valuable assets to a detachment—especially the medics. Then Hicks reports that his signal men are down, too, and there goes most of another valuable asset.

Instinct, not intelligence. The enemy didn’t know the platoon is down to one radio that can’t broadcast. There wasn’t even a hint of a warning, and that’s never happened outside of department training.

“The VCs have someone with them who either ditched the department, or who didn’t need ETKC-51 in the first fucking place,” Django says. “They knew exactly who to take out with the first volley to do the most damage.” It’s the only way these bastards can be fucking invisible.

“Or they were dosed by someone else.” Kellagh-Ambrus gives him a sharp, searching look, like he’s making a decision. “One of the biggest operations for the department right now? Trying to determine if someone passed ETKC-51 off to the Russians.”

Django feels his lip curl up in anger. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“No. You didn’t hear that from me, either.” Kellagh-Ambrus’s hands tighten on his rifle. “You have people in harm’s way. Cover me.”

Django has just enough time to nod and get his weapon up before Kellagh-Ambrus is dashing across the open path between burnt homes. He lays down enough firepower to mow the jungle lawn while Kellagh-Ambrus grabs Guong by the legs and drags him out of the hot zone.

“GUONG’S STILL WITH US!” Kellagh-Ambrus yells, and Django breathes out a sigh of relief.

“REDGRAVE ISN’T!” Hicks shouts. “Most of our medics are on the ground, Boss!”

“It doesn’t matter if you can’t see them!” Django yells. “You have automatic weapons and you know how to use them, soldiers! If you see a muzzle flash, aim in that damned direction and let them fucking have it!”

“Man, you are BLEEDING!” Guong blurts out.

Django scowls. _Dammit, Kid. Watch your ass_.

“I’ll live!” Kellagh-Ambrus retorts. “Keep your damned head down and cover my ass while I try for Redgrave!”

Most of Django’s people weren’t in his line of sight when shit went sideways. He listens to the gunfire instead, which tells him where his men are holed up in this ruin.

Casey does a damned awful job of trying to break the tension by complaining about the corpses he’s sharing a hooch with. Django decides he is not going to look into the destroyed house he’s huddled up next to. He knows innocent people died today, but he can’t dwell on it right now. He has a job to do: keeping everyone else alive.

When the ambush started, it was a half-hour before sunset. After dark, the situation gets worse. Muzzle flashes are the only signs of the enemy he can find. Django can’t see the rifle the flash comes from or the person holding the weapon. He fires a spray of bullets at those flashes and hits nothing.

It isn’t that dark. They have a decent waning gibbous moon providing a bit of extra light. He still can’t see the enemy. He just knows the bastards are killing them.

“Aw, fuck,” Django hears Moseley say around twenty-two-hundred hours. “I think the spook’s down.”

Django feels his blood run cold. Outside of Jason, Helen, and their kids, Éoghan Kellagh-Ambrus is one of the few people he has left. It doesn’t matter if the little shit up and vanished for eighteen years. The kid is _not_ allowed to die.

“Moseley! What are our numbers?” Django yells, wincing as he places his hand on his right side. Not a lung hit, but damn, it still hurts.

“Running hot and perfectly!” Moseley shouts back.

Fuck, they’re down by at least half. Moseley might even be sugarcoating it. He just can’t—he can’t lose these men. Not after keeping them alive in this hellhole since 1st Group’s official withdrawal. They stood together and survived together with no backup, no extractions, and no assistance. He won’t lose them to this.

The next time he calls Moseley’s name, he doesn’t get an answer. Django swallows hard and reloads, feeling his eyes burn. Moseley believed Django was the person to follow—the man who would see them all home safe. He can only hope that Phil has gone weapons-deaf and can’t fucking hear him.

The night progresses like an unending nightmare. Django conserves his shots for the times he catches sight of muzzle flashes in the bush, but he never hears the sound of a bullet finding its way home. Not out there.

He’s hearing it in the village. Too often.

During the only lull they have, Django swaps out the bandages on his thigh, right side, and arm with the meager supplies left in his kit. He uses up the last drops of iodine in what may be a pathetic attempt at warding off infection, especially given the dirt he’s been wallowing in for hours.

The steady pop of automatic fire is still coming in hot from outside the village, but inside the remains of Ninh Chu, Django is hearing it less and less. Someone gave up on their rifle, firing their 1911 instead. He hopes they’re putting large holes in their targets, but he’s not counting on it.

When the sky begins to lighten in the east. Django checks his watch. Half-hour before dawn. He’s starting to realize what it’s really going to take to end this fight, and the thought turns his stomach. He never told any of his men about the department, or about the shit he can do that isn’t quite American-grade normal. Some of Django’s command line picked up on the fact that Django’s intuition is a little too good, but it wasn’t something anyone discussed. Soldier’s superstition—don’t talk about your good luck, or you’ll never see it again.

“Sound off!” Django orders in a harsh rasp of a shout. He waits, heart thudding in the darkness. Please.

Jones reports in with a wavering sound that might be Django’s rank.

Sakda says something in Vietnamese about bleeding out, and claims he’s going to kill everything he can before he dies.

Jenkins sounds all right, but there isn’t any firing from his position.

Patterson gurgles and then shouts out an affirm. He’s lung-shot, and he’s drowning. Django is too far away to get to him.

Fisher says Django’s last name, two more words, and then falls silent.

No one else. He doesn’t hear anyone.

If this is what the sound of silence is really like, Django is never going to be able to listen to that fucking song ever again.

Sudden rage makes his palms sing with the remembered feel of static electricity. How fucking dare they. How fucking DARE they! His people have families and homes that they fucking well deserve to see again! They all deserve better than this!

Django doesn’t consciously recall doing it, but he knows he must have. All Django can remember is anger in one moment, and blinking the sharp light of a close, massive lightning strike out of his eyes in the next. In between those moments, there is nothing, a blank spot in his thoughts. His head aches and his ears are ringing; he can’t hear a fucking thing. The air smells like ozone, burning greenery, burnt fabric, melted plastic, and scorched flesh.

The ringing in his ears fades away. No one is shooting now. Not on either side.

Django puts his hat onto his rifle and raises it into the air slowly, like a man trying to get his eyes on the situation. Nothing. He stands up, stiff from hours on the ground, and nearly falls down again in shock.

The engagement zone around the village is blackened char and white ash that dips into the earth like a crater on the moon.

A few splintered trees in that crater are burning. There are lumps on the ground, still and blackened—the soldiers that they couldn’t find or track no matter how many flares they tossed at the tree line. He can see the sharp edges of clay that’s been superheated into mutilated solid shapes.

 _Forget the lightning strike._ Those fuckers are dead. Django has men to find.

He can’t have lost them all. He just—no. He can’t.

He finds Hundley first, along with Fisher, Crabtree, West, and Jordan—their entire Rat team. Django checks pulses while feeling the chill of their skin. He lifts Hundley’s arm and it’s slack.

Hours. They’ve been dead for hours.

He should have called the lightning the moment Moseley reported Kellagh-Ambrus down, and to hell with the consequences. He didn’t.

This is on him. All of it.

Guong took another hit sometime during the night. The original bandages applied by Kellagh-Ambrus are still in place around his thigh, reddened and dirty, but he bled out from an arterial tap at the neck.

Jones and Brown were fighting back to back. They went down together in a sprawl that’s reminiscent of two men sleeping together in a tangle of limbs.

Hicks was pulled out of the firing line and left in the shelter of an overturned wagon, but Django thinks Hicks probably died before Moseley. The radio on his back is absolutely savaged by gunfire.

Moseley is lying next to Hicks. Headshot to the temple, small caliber round. Sniper shot, maybe, or friendly damned fire, but it’s the only wound he has.

He counts off their names as he finds their bodies: Casey. Lovejoy. Stewart. Russell. Diaz. Wagner. Dunn.

Patterson is still alive when Django finds him, gray with blood loss. “Boss,” Patterson whispers. His teeth are stained purple in the pre-dawn light, turning red as the sun rises. “I know I’m on the way out.”

“Shut up, Patterson,” Django orders, trying to find a way to staunch the blood before he realizes that the man has five holes in his chest from high-caliber rounds. The ground around him is soaking up the blood and turning the red dust to damp earth. “Shit.” He can’t save someone who doesn’t have enough blood to live.

Patterson pats Django’s arm. “S’all right, sir. We tried. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re the best. Letter’s in my pocket for my kids at home. Make sure it goes out, ’kay?”

Django grasps Patterson’s hand. “You’re damned right I will, Sergeant.” He holds onto Patterson until he feels the man’s life slip away.

Takei lives long enough to yank his tag free and put it into Django’s hand. “For my wife,” he gasps, and dies in the next breath. Takei’s loss means that Django’s entire command team for the volunteer platoon is gone.

Nichols and Jenkins both went down during the first volley. He finds them lying on a path between burnt homes. That they’re dead is…it’s really damned obvious. He feels like he’s choking as he retrieves their tags.

Django turns away, still searching. He came here with forty-three men and an asshole disappearing-act ginger. He’s not done until he’s found them all.

Hawkins. Riley. Lawson. Smith. Castillo. Nguyen. Brewer. O’Brian. Schultz. Thompson. All accounted for. All dead.

Sakda bled out just as he’d promised, but used up every single grenade, flare, smoke canister, and bullet he had before dropping. His empty 1911 is still clenched in his hand.

Django only discovers Sharp’s status because he finds the man’s dog tag hanging from the fork of a tree branch that’s been shoved into the ground. In the red dirt next to the stick is a crudely drawn “C-4” with an arrow next to it. Django looks in the direction the arrow is pointing and finds a crater made by damned good demolitions expert, one who was trying his best to take out the enemy. Django hopes that Sharp nailed a few of the bastards.

McGee. Cohen. Blair. Copeland. Atkins. Pacheco. He closes their eyes and moves on.

Three more. Still trying to find a damned ginger.

Leblanc is still alive, but not lucid, not aware of Django’s presence at all. Tourniquets at both knees kept him from bleeding out the way others did, but Leblanc needed medical help hours ago. It’s too late now. Django holds his open palm over Leblanc’s chest, swears at what he can sense, and then closes the man’s eyes. Leblanc is dead a minute later.

Jeff Chang is sitting up when Django finds him, and for a brief moment, he thinks one of Hicks’s signal men survived. Then he realized that the ragged fence of a half-destroyed goat pen is the only thing keeping him upright. Someone nailed him with a gutshot that killed him overnight. Even if someone had gotten to Chang before the shock killed him, Redgrave and the medics were already dead. Django was pinned at the opposite end of the village. No surgeons, no antibiotics. No help.

Brent House from Lexington is the only other man he finds who isn’t dead yet. “Hey, Boss.”

Django kneels down at House’s side. He honestly doesn’t know how the man is still alive. House must have been hit by a steady stream of automatic weapons fire, and the result isn’t pretty.

“Last man standing, I think,” House says, answering his unspoken question. “Easy target at that point. Glad you’re still walking, sir.”

“You’re going to be all right,” Django says, but House smirks, pats his hand, and drops away like a moth suddenly engulfed by flame. He’d been waiting for Django. That’s why he lingered.

Fuck, he can’t do this. He has one more person to find, and now he knows he’s hunting for a corpse.

Kellagh-Ambrus is lying on his side in the cratered remains of a one-room house. Django is glad there are no other bodies. He’s seen too many already. He might have been focused on finding his forty-three men, his people, but there were three hundred souls in this village when the napalm dropped. He couldn’t avoid any of them.

A faint sound yanks him out of his thoughts. “Django?”

Django darts forward and drops down next to Kellagh-Ambrus. “Éoghan?”

Kellagh-Ambrus’s eyes crack open, pale and silvery blue in dawn light that hasn’t yet turned to gold. “Hey, Django. Fuck all of this, right?”

“Yeah.” Django grits his teeth and rolls Ambrus over, hissing in a breath at what he finds. Ambrus’s entire shirt is soaked through with red. “Did you count them?” he asks, cracking a terrible wreck of a smile.

“Always do. Think I hit nine before I passed out,” Kellagh-Ambrus rasps. “New record.”

Django’s hands are shaking. “No wonder you’re still department, Kid. You’re fucking nuts.” He can feel Kellagh-Ambrus fading, like he’s stopped fighting to stay alive. “Hey, you knock that shit off. You’re going to live. You owe me a damned beer. You promised me a beer in 1956, you son of a bitch!”

“Don’t insult my mother. S’not polite,” Kellagh-Ambrus mutters, his eyes sliding closed.

Django doesn’t wait any longer. He isn’t going to give the kid the chance to pull what three other men did this morning, slipping away for good while Django just stared at them like a useless asshole.

His hands don’t tingle when he places them over Kellagh-Ambrus’s chest, not like the electricity he feels when he calls lightning. He’s only done this twice before. The first time it worked, and Mayamiko Mphepo lived. The second time it didn’t, and Charlie Richards died.

It’s going to work this time. Django isn’t watching anyone else die today. Forty-three faces flash through his mind in rapid succession. It’s all the fuel he needs to call on the same strength that brought down lightning and death—except this time, it’s forced healing and life.

Kellagh-Ambrus gasps, his back arching off the ground before he collapses again, breathing hard. “Fucker!” he shouts. “That hurt!”

“Worse than nine damned bullets?” Django asks in disbelief.

“Okay. Good point,” Kellagh-Ambrus admits in a slurred voice, right before he passes out.

Django gets out his knife and starts slicing off Kellagh-Ambrus’s shirt. Even if the kid doesn’t have spares, Django does, and he needs this bloody reminder gone right fucking now. He needs to see with his own damned eyes that Kellagh-Ambrus is now lacking nine bullet wounds from 30mm weapons.

If Éoghan hadn’t been department, if they’d never signed that paperwork and agreed to be guinea pigs, he’d be dead. Django can’t quite make himself feel any sort of gratitude towards those bastards, but right now he’s damned fond of ETKC-51.

By the time Kellagh-Ambrus wakes up again, it’s almost noon. Django managed to get him onto a bedroll he took from a dead man. Then Django spread out his own roll on the other side of the ruined hovel, dropped down onto it, and didn’t sleep at all.

“Hey.” Kellagh-Ambrus licks his lips and makes a face. “How long was I out?”

“It’s eleven-thirty,” Django says. “About five hours. How you feeling?”

“Like I was shot in the chest by a fucking tank.” Ambrus turns his head to look at Django. “I missed part of the firefight. Are the others—”

Django cuts him off, his voice too harsh. “No. No one else—” He has to stop and lie back, staring up at a cloudless Vietnamese sky.

He feels like he can’t breathe. Like he’s going to pass out. Vomit. Scream. Throw something. Sob.

Django doesn’t know. It’s just too much. “None of them survived, Éoghan. It’s just us.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There isn't much to do in the aftermath. 
> 
> There really hasn't been much to do in a year and change, but now there's nothing else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @norcumi is the beta responsible for me completing what I have of this and subjecting all of you to pain. Words! I meant words. A lot of words. Definitely that.
> 
> (Okay, it's both.)
> 
> This is also a continued thank-you to people who've helped fund our relocation to a location that isn't actively trying to kill me. I couldn't leave it completely on an "everything is terrible" note. Things are now _slightly_ less terrible.

The village is dead silent the next morning. Gods, but he didn’t mean that pun.

Django makes certain that every man on the ground has a toe tag still laced to their boot, or if that’s not possible, tied to something else. He stands up after seeing to Phil and tries to wipe dried blood and mud off of his hands. Everything in Ninh Chu reeks of char, blood, fire, and death. It’s been eleven years and he still isn’t used to that smell. Maybe he’ll get lucky, and he never will be.

“This is my fault.”

Django jerks his head up to give Kellagh-Ambrus a sharp look. The kid is staring at the corpses, an expression of tired, angry resignation on his face. “The hell it is.”

“None of you would be here if I had kept my mouth shut,” Kellagh-Ambrus says.

“Bullshit.” Django stands up and grabs Kellagh-Ambrus by the shoulder. “Don’t get me wrong, I hate this. I hate this so fucking much that I don’t even know where to begin with—not about anything. But every single one of my men volunteered to come here, Éoghan. When you’re running volunteer slog suicide missions, it’s unanimous decisions only, remember? We all chose this. The fact that we found a fucking ambush waiting for us is not your damned fault.”

Kellagh-Ambrus stares back at him. “I’ll believe it’s not my fault the moment you do.”

“You’ve learned how to play fuckin’ dirty, Kid.”

They can’t stay in the village, not when it’s been a recent target that’s full of corpses. Django slings Kellagh-Ambrus’s arm over his shoulder so they can hump it out of there, both of them still limping.

“Hell of a reunion, right?” Kellagh-Ambrus quips at one point, sounding like he’d rather be chewing on molten glass.

“Bodies on the ground and explosions. Yeah. Sounds about right,” Django replies, bizarrely grateful that the man’s trying to lighten the mood without making light of this entire shit situation. Django has the weight of forty-three tags in his pack. It feels like they get heavier with every step he takes.

They get rained on that night while sheltering in a pathetic pit. This one wasn’t a tunnel collapse, but the crater left over from a munitions drop. Django goes to sleep after swapping the night watch with Kellagh-Ambrus and wakes up to the kid’s eyes on him.

“You don’t want to go back yet, do you?” Éoghan asks, though it doesn’t sound much like a question.

Django scrubs at his face and eyes, trying to wake up in a damned hurry without coffee to assist. “No. I really fucking don’t. I’d probably kill every single motherfucker still wearing brass in Saigon except the one named Merrill.”

Éoghan buries his face into his sleeve and coughs, face contorting in pain from the remaining bruising from having nine bullet wounds healed at once. “Didn’t think so. How’s your Russian?”

“ _Ukusite moyu zadnitsu, Imbir_.”

“Oi! Don’t be rude.” Éoghan drops a boonie hat onto the barrel of his rifle and slowly raises it above the edge of the depression. Django realizes he’s holding his breath and lets it out in annoyance when no one shoots at them for waving a hat around. “There is a neutral establishment in the Tánh Linh District, Bình Tuy Province. If you know how to make the approach, it may be one of the only safe places left in the country. If you’re trying to avoid conflict or irate superior officers, it’s the perfect place to go to ground.”

“Bình Tuy has to be NVA-controlled by now, given how far south the fighting’s come,” Django says.

“Probably.” Éoghan reclaims the hat and puts it on, pinning down his hair. “Are you willing to follow my lead?”

“You know, I used to ask you that.” Django rolls his eyes when Éoghan just gives him an expectant look. “Yeah, Kid. You know I will.”

“Good. You’ve just become a Russian mercenary hired by the North Vietnamese to help secure their holdings in the south. Ditch everything that can identify you as American that isn’t your military ID and the tag you’re wearing topside. Those we can claim are forged, part of the deception that keeps you from being picked up by ARVN. The other tags…” Éoghan hesitates. “Don’t punch me. If those are found and someone asks, tell them the tags for your people are either war trophies, or your means of making certain you get paid.”

The temptation to punch the man is brief because Django knows Éoghan is right. “Fuck.” He unlaces his boot to claim his toe tag, shoving it into his sock. The pathetic remnants of his wallet with its tattered ID and surviving photo of his sister are tucked into a pocket on the inside of his coat, one that hides along a seam line. A strip search wouldn’t hide it, but if no one fucks with them, it’ll be fine. “How far are we going?”

“If the roads are still clear, it’s about one hundred twenty kliks,” Éoghan says, easing out of their muddy campsite and looking around before he motions for Django to follow.

“That is a long-ass way, Éoghan.”

“Well, I sure as fuck don’t plan to walk there.” Éoghan snags Django’s hand when his injured leg protests and nearly sends him sliding right back down into the muck.

It doesn’t take them long to find a VC patrol. The kids in charge hear Russian and send Django and Éoghan south down to the east-west line, where they encounter a North Vietnamese group clearing the road to allow the heavy artillery through.

Django listens to Éoghan weave fucking magic when it comes to convincing the NVA that they’re Russian mercenaries heading north after a successful infiltration through ARVN lines. He even mentions American military patrols that are still on the ground.

One of the NVA officers finds this funny. “You see?” he says to his subordinates. “Americans lie, just like we tell you!” The others laugh. It’s work to force a fake smile onto his face, but maybe that’s all right; the nearest baby-faced soldiers take several steps away from Django.

Éoghan puts on a bitter smile that Django thinks isn’t fake at all. “It’s war. Everyone lies.”

“Not us,” the officer responds in a staunch voice. “Never us.”

“A good point,” Éoghan agrees. “It is, yes?” he nudges Django.

“Lie to your enemies, not your allies,” Django says and realizes he sounds pretty bitter, too.

“Exactly!” the officer replies, grinning. “You need a ride?”

“Yes, if it’s possible,” Éoghan leaps on the opportunity like an exhausted man. It’s not as if they have to fake that shit, either. “If anyone is going north to resupply, we need to stop at the White Tiger.”

The truck going north is full of non-coms who rotate out in shifts to keep the army supplied. There isn’t much room left unless they sit on the back end, their feet dangling out over the road. It makes Django’s skin crawl to have a truckful of NVA types behind him, but it’s an instinct he has to ignore. They’re non-coms, even if they’re probably armed. Non-coms. He didn’t start this war by shooting non-coms, no matter whose side they were on, and he’s damned sure not going to end the war that way—unless they shoot first.

Éoghan leans over to block the others’ line of sight and then grabs Django by the wrist, his thumb digging into a pressure point. “Fucking relax,” he hisses.

“Fuck you, too,” Django mutters, but does try to make his shoulders settle back down.

The ride is slow until they’re about an hour into the trip. The roads are a riddled mess created by shelling from both sides, but the obstructions are all but gone. Django takes note of everything, wondering if this mysterious White Tiger has a phone. He doesn’t want to ask about where they’re going, not when they’re still in a truck full of NVA types.

Five hours later, they’re dropped off on the side of the road and have to walk the rest of the way along a dirt track barely wide enough for a jeep. Éoghan looks like he’s dragging himself along and Django’s leg is fucking burning by the time they turn off the muddy road down a narrow dirt lane. A few houses are clustered around the largest building, which has two stories and looks pretty damned prosperous for a village this far from the main road.

Django looks up at the wooden sign over the entrance. Its paint must have been reapplied during the dry season; the tiger design and the letters, Vietnamese and English, are still almost pristine. “ _Hổ Trắng T_ _ửu Q_ _uán_. White Tigers Tavern. A fuckin’ bar is the safest place in Vietnam?”

“Unless you’re already waiting to be shipped home in a box? Yes.” Éoghan removes his hat long enough to wipe his face dry with it. “Owner’s name is Cự-Ly. Her husband died in 1966 in the fighting, so she decided that this war was complete shit and she wasn’t having anything else to do with it. Built a bar, put herself and her kids to work, and spread the word that this was neutral ground…or else.”

Django raises an eyebrow. “Or else what?”

“Cự-Ly personally disemboweled the first soldier who violated her bar’s neutrality. Hung his entrails from the veranda here as a warning for everyone else. No one has so much as picked a fight in this place since then.”

Django shoulders his rifle. “You mean we could shout at the rafters that we were American soldiers and no one would give a fuck.”

“As long as we’re inside? Absolutely,” Éoghan replies. “Granted, if they catch us off tavern property, no one will hesitate to kill us. When we’re ready to leave, it sure as hell won’t be through the front door.”

“Noted.”

Éoghan glares at him before they go inside. “And I’m still Scottish, asshole.”

Django smiles. “Whatever you say, English.”

“Fuck you. Want to get pissed, you Māori prick?” Éoghan asks.

“I’m already pissed off,” Django replies. “But I’ll happily join you in getting plastered.”

“Yeah.” Éoghan glances away. “Django. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t even start with that,” Django says, pulling the other man into a hug. “Forget 1956. I’m just glad you’re alive.”

Éoghan nods without releasing his tight grip on the back of Django’s shirt. “I’m glad you are, too.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

Django doesn’t notice much about the tavern, not at first. He’s a hell of a lot more concerned with getting one of the available rooms upstairs and unloading most of his gear except for the 1911, which he’s keeping strapped to his side. He leaves everything else behind the locked door and pays for a hot bath provided by a standing metal tub in a shack behind the bar. Every bath he’s had so far this year came from a mud puddle, so he intends to enjoy this one.

Django expects the bullet wounds in his thigh, side, and arm to still be messy, and is surprised to find them half-healed. That isn’t Éoghan’s work, either, not when the kid was recently dying.

 _The lightning_ , Django thinks, throwing the dirty bandages away before he sinks into warm water. There isn’t any other reason for those wounds to have healed so fast, but he’s never known lightning to speed up that aspect of his stupid government-funded physiology.

Granted, he hasn’t called lightning down from the sky since 1956. What the fuck does he know?

Django jerks awake and tries to punch Éoghan when the man wakes him up. “Calm the fuck down!” Éoghan shouts, pinning Django’s free arm against the rim of the tub.

He pants for breath as the adrenaline rush floods his system, making Django feel like he’s going to be sick. “Sorry. The fuck?”

“I wanted a turn before the next decade, lost patience, and discovered that you decided this was a good place to nap,” Éoghan says in irritation. “Finish up and drain the tub, all right? No one else should ever be forced to bathe in the shit that just came off of you.”

“That is pure distilled essence of the Vietnam War, Kid.”

“That’s exactly my fucking point!” Éoghan shoves clothes at him that don’t smell like molding jungle rot. “Your arse is lucky we wear the same size.”

“Thanks.”

Getting dressed in clothes that aren’t already rank and bloody is a relief. Before Django drains the water, he uses his aging straight razor to remove the stubble from his face. The rusting scissors from his kit take off most of his hair, along with any potential infestations that he really doesn’t want to have to deal with.

Éoghan is leaning against the wall of the bathhouse with his eyes shut when Django steps outside. “Your turn,” Django says.

Éoghan opens his eyes and gives Django an approving look. “You almost look civilized again.”

“I’m never fucking civilized. There a phone in this place?” Django asks.

“Get out a ten-dollar bill and go ask Sally,” Éoghan replies. “She has a military radio in her kitchen. The antenna hides in the tree line.”

“Got it.”

When Django goes back into the tavern, he pays more attention. White Tigers is a wood-floored building with thick bamboo columns that support the ceiling. Downstairs is a big open room with a full bar lit by electric lights on a generator. A beat-up jukebox has Vietnamese and American music almost ten years out of date. A single flight of stairs goes up to the second floor and rooms that are rented out to whoever has money to pay for them. The place is half-full; everyone is VC or VCA except himself and Éoghan.

Django has a disconcerting feeling that he’s been here before. Might have been more than once, too, but so many of these places look the same. He doesn’t recognize Cự-Ly, who’s Americanized her name to Sally. If she knows his face from Adam, she doesn’t say.

Sally takes the American ten-dollar bill from his hand and shows him to the radio, which is just as Éoghan promised—a full military setup with a handset. “Thanks.”

“You call anyone here, you make sure they know my bar neutral!” Sally insists.

“I’m not calling anyone to come out here. I need to send them somewhere else,” Django says. She gives him a narrow-eyed look, nods, and leaves him alone.

Django watched his men do their jobs for too many years not to have the hang of it by now. The biggest pain in the ass is convincing the radio operators in Saigon to pass him along. Most of them sound like kids, and they all speak like they’re stressed to hell and back.

He doesn’t care. They’re going to do their jobs and _like_ it. “Listen to me, right now. This is Oscar-Six Three-Nine-Three-Six. Classify me at Sierra One, Foxtrot One, Papa Alpha-Four-Seven-Three-Three. Authenticate immediately, or I will motherfucking find you. Over.”

“Roger, Oscar-Six. Please hold for verification.”

Django leans against the wall and switches the handset to his other ear. Finally, he’s getting somewhere. It only took ten minutes for someone to pay attention to his verification code, which tells him that shit must be going down that’s making the airwaves messy.

“Call sign verified, Oscar-Six. WILCO. Over.”

“Roger that,” Django says, rubbing at his eyes. “FUBAR, Operator? Over.”

“TARFU, Oscar-Six,” the man replies. “Switching you over to the Green Line now. Over.”

Django lets his head thump back against the wall. He just realized he doesn’t even know what day it is.

It’s another five before Jason picks up. “Soldier, re-authenticate call sign and verify. Over.”

“Are you shitting me?” Django mutters. “Oscar-Six Three-Nine-Three-Six. Sierra One, Foxtrot One, Papa Alpha-Four-Seven-Three-Three. Verify, over.”

“That’s confirmed,” Jason says, and then he’s yelling. “FUCKING CHRIST! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?”

“Neutral territory, Oscar-Eight.”

“Where the hell is that, Oscar-Six?” Jason asks. “I want a sit-rep, right now.”

“Neutral territory, Oscar-Eight.” Django unclenches his fist when he feels his nails bite into his palm. “Oscar-Six is reporting a loss of all assets, civilian and military, except for the ginger you sent my way.”

There’s a long pause. “Repeat that. I need numbers for a confirm, Oscar-Six.”

Django thumps his head against the wall again. “Full loss, all assets civilian and military except the ginger. That’s a three hundred count and a forty-three count, Oscar-Eight.”

“Jesus wept.” Jason isn’t yelling anymore. Django would rather be shouted at instead of listening to that harsh, damning whisper. “What happened, Oscar-Six?”

“Initial target is green and clear,” Django says. “Secondary target is a barbecue with an unknown number of ECs, all deceased. ETS on the three-hundred and the forty-three is yesterday.”

Jason’s voice is steady when he responds. “That’s ETS yesterday, three hundred count and forty-three count on assets lost. Confirm?”

“That’s correct, Oscar-Eight.”

“Understood, Oscar-Six,” Jason says heavily. “Come home.”

“Negative.” Django glares at a kid that comes into the kitchen until the boy wises up and retreats. “Secondary target needs a meat wagon, Oscar-Eight.”

“That may not be possible, Oscar-Six.”

Oh, hell no. Django doesn’t care if Saigon is burning down around Jason’s ears right now. “The area’s green, Oscar-Eight. You promised them a six-by-three ride home. Make it happen.”

“That area may be green, but ours isn’t, Oscar-Six,” Jason retorts.

“Roger, Oscar-Eight, but I don’t give a fuck. Send a bird or I’ll steal the closest one.”

“Oscar-Six, don’t you dare start another clusterfuck. I say again: come home. That’s an order.”

Django’s shoulders slump when a wave of exhaustion hits hard. “Negative, Oscar-Eight. I’ll see you when I see you. Oscar-Six out.” He shoves the phone into its cradle and powers off the radio before leaving Sally’s kitchen.

 

*          *          *          *

 

He sleeps and wakes up around sunset, trying to remember where the hell he is. The bamboo-pole roof above his head helps ground him, as does the recognition that he’s wearing trousers that don’t fit right. Close in size, but not quite. That ability to share clothes back and forth hadn’t been possible until Éoghan finished growing back in the ’50s, but it had damned sure come in handy afterwards.

Django taps on his watch and tilts it until he can make out the tiny date dial beneath the fog clouding the quartz. It isn’t set right—he can’t reset it, not after it took one too many hits in the field—but the dial never stopped turning the numbers every twenty-four hours. He slept for a full night and most of the next day.

Downstairs, the bar is full up with soldiers and locals. The haze of cigarette smoke floating around at eye level makes it hard to see a fucking thing. A teenage girl with a nice voice and good hands on a dan ty ba is giving everyone something different to listen to while the outdated jukebox sits powered off in the corner.

When he finds Éoghan, Django almost doesn’t recognize him. The foul-mouthed hippie is gone, replaced by a clean-shaven ginger with his hair clipped almost regulation short. Django thought maybe it was the mess of hair and beard making Éoghan look older, but that just made it more obvious. The kid’s lost the baby face that Inali used to tease him about, the one that fooled so many assholes into thinking they were dealing with someone completely harmless.

Django is forty-seven; Kellagh-Ambrus is forty. They both look like they’re no older than twenty-five.

“Is it everyone else, too?” Django finds himself asking.

Éoghan glances up at him. “Good evening. Is it everyone else what?”

Django rolls his eyes. “Hi, asshole. You’re still with the department, so tell me: is everyone else dealing with this slow-aging shit?”

“It’s everyone,” Éoghan answers after a moment’s silence. “Inali, Chisomo, Lam-Pan, Smith, Irvine—all of us. The roster’s a bit longer than twenty now, but…yes. All of us. No exceptions. Why?”

He sits down next to Éoghan. “I didn’t know. I’m aware of the fact that Jason still talks to some of us stupid guinea pigs, but I didn’t want to ask him if I was some shit-luck exception. His job’s fucking complicated enough.”

“Yeah, it is.” Éoghan pulls out a cigarette and ignites it without a lighter after checking to make sure no one is looking. Django doesn’t think anyone could make out jack shit with that cloud hanging around their heads, anyway.

“That’s all I can tell you about the department itself,” Éoghan says. “If you ask if someone’s dead or alive, I’ll tell you. If you want to discuss side effects, that’s fair game; you signed those particular NDAs, too. As for policy, structure, and purpose? Too many non-disclosure agreements in the way.”

“I get the feeling you’re not even supposed to offer me that much.”

Éoghan shrugs. “Right now, I’m less inclined to care…and no one is ever going to find out we’ve spoken in any capacity that isn’t directly related to Ninh Chu. Ever.”

Django raises an eyebrow. “What if they ask questions?”

“Then I’ll fucking lie to them.” Éoghan blows out a jet of smoke and smiles. “Irvine’s the current director. He won’t ask.”

“Charlie?” Django shakes his head. “He never struck me as the paper-pushing type.”

“Better him than the many other terrible possibilities,” Éoghan says. “He retired from active duty just to take on the role so no one else would get it. I still haven’t decided if that was ambition or altruism on his part.”

“Knowing him?” Django considers what he remembers about Charles Irvine. “Probably both.”

“Still better than the alternative,” Éoghan says.

Django collects a local beer from Sally, who ignores his name and just calls him Soldier Boy. “I’m over forty years old!”

Sally grins. “You all Soldier Boys to me.” Then she marches halfway across the bar to yell at a group of rowdy North Korean soldiers in a blend of vicious-sounding French and Vietnamese.

“Must only be a Soldier Boy if you’re behaving yourself,” Django says. The idiots quickly become Soldier Boys again when she pulls out a butcher’s knife. Instant civilized behavior.

“Sally’s efficiency is something every military in the world should understand,” Éoghan comments.

Django grimaces at that idea. “Not all of them.” He finishes the beer before asking, “What’s the date?”

“Twenty-fifth of March. It’s Tuesday.” Éoghan glances at him as he stubs out the cigarette. “Did you report in yesterday?”

“Yeah. Jason ordered me to report back to Saigon.”

“You don’t look like a man who’s in a hurry to follow orders.”

“Nope,” Django agrees. “You?”

Éoghan shakes his head. “I’m supposed to be collecting intelligence to gain the U.S. a victory that is now impossible short of wiping Vietnam off the face of the Earth with a nuke and calling it good. No, I’m really not in that kind of hurry.”

“A nuke. That’d make the anti-war politicians back home so fucking popular.” Django gains Sally’s attention again. “What’s the strongest alcohol you’ve got?”

Sally purses her lips. “You give me fifty-dollar, I make certain you blind drunk for a week.”

Django ignores the pair of tens in his wallet and slides his last fifty across the bar. “Sounds good to me.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

Sally is true to her word. Except for some moments that are going to stick with him just for the sheer fucking insanity involved, Django spends a great deal of that week too drunk to think, much less remember the reason why he’s hiding in a bar. Django’s physical wounds are healing up in a way that might not leave scars, and Éoghan stops looking like walking death.

That’s not true; he never really forgets. He’s just able to shove those memories conveniently off to the side when they try to get his attention.

Éoghan takes a long drag off that evening’s fifth cigarette, letting the smoke out in swirling white curls to join the lingering cloud above them. “Did you notice that it doesn’t really work all that well anymore?”

“Harder to get drunk? Yeah, I noticed.” Django points at the bottle of cheap U.S.-labeled gin that looks like it was probably stolen from Saigon. “There has to be something better in this place than that shit.”

“Maybe there is, but I’m intent on finishing this one first. Paid for it already.” Éoghan pours a full shot and slides the glass over to him.

Django takes it and tosses it back, grimacing a bit when the back end hits. He’s not a fan of gin, and this one tastes like someone pulled and bottled the batch too early. “What are you drinking to?”

Éoghan takes a shot. “I’m celebrating the fact that I wasted the last fifteen years of my life on a failed attempt to save this fucking country.”

“You’ve been in this fucking country for fifteen years,” Django repeats, incensed. “Are you shitting me?”

“Well, not a solid fifteen.” Éoghan takes another drag on the cigarette, the tip glowing bright red as he inhales. “At first, it was just about investigating what the fuck was going on with southern Vietnam and the Việt Cộng back when they were still just the NLF. Into the country, back out again, hand in intelligence that was probably never used, get laid, come back to this place again. I’ve been here solid since 1964, though.”

“Same,” Django says. “In another month it’ll be a full eleven years.” He came in with Jason in May of 1964. That was well ahead of the rest of 1st Group, who wouldn’t be on the ground for another six months. Django went out into the countryside with his ear to the ground, listening to the chatter from civvies and military alike. Jason was in the middle of helping to fold MAAG into Military Assistance Command when the old Assistance Advisory Group couldn’t keep up with the job anymore.

Neither of them have been out of the country since, though Jason’s wife has been to Vietnam several times doing Red Cross work. During the occasional ceasefire, Helen brought David and Judith in to visit their father so the kids wouldn’t forget what Jason looked like.

Django managed to be there for their last visit in November of 1973. David was already fourteen at that point, attempting to be a tall and gangly ginger copy of Helen. Judith was eleven and still just as gorgeous as the day she was born, with her father’s solid blue eyes and her great-grandmother’s brown skin and elegant features. The Civil Rights Act passed in the States when she was two, which made them all let out a huge sigh of relief in regards to Judith’s future.

He expects kids to grow, so Judith and David hadn’t been much of a surprise. It was Helen who’d shocked Django. She was fifty-three and still beautiful, but there was no denying the fact that she looked her age. Stress from the war was stealing the color from her hair just as swiftly as it was turning Jason’s blond hair into dark steel.

Django looks up when he hears a thud. One of the VC boys embedded a boot knife in the bar’s ceiling to cheers from his friends. Django looks at the growing collection of knives, frowning. “You know, I could have sworn that wasn’t there yesterday afternoon.”

“Pretty sure we started that trend,” Éoghan says. “I remember some NVA asshole challenging me in horrible Russian, and I woke up with an extra three hundred đồng in my wallet.”

“That would explain why I couldn’t find my fucking knife this morning.” Django watches as Éoghan swaps out the cigarette for another shot of gin. “How’s Gyata Ki?”

The bottle hits the table hard. “Dead. 1968.”

“The fuck—he was forty-two years old!” Django stares at Éoghan. “What the hell happened?”

“I’m pretty sure someone murdered him.” Éoghan sounds far too calm, especially when Django can see muscles flexing as he clenches his jaw. “But I was over here. The coroner could never make an official determination, and his sister had him cremated before I could push through another request for toxicology. I don’t know if she bothered with any kind of memorial, but if Kamilla did, it’s probably in Japan. I won’t find it. She never did like me very much.”

“She never did get over her brother being queer. Hard enough being Japanese and Irish at the same time, I guess.” It’s all Django can think of to say. When Éoghan was younger, Django, Inali, Chisomo—they’d all worried about the kid’s crush on an older man. Django could admit that Gyata Ki was nice on the eyes, but he’d also fought his way up the ranks to be oversight on the damned program. Conflict of interest and all that shit, but Gyata Ki Sano proved himself to be a decent person.

At least Inali and Chisomo are still alive, and they didn’t have to put boots on the ground in Vietnam. Lucky fuckers.

“You ever find anyone, Django?” Éoghan asks. He sounds tired and sad, and the flare from lighting a new cigarette reveals an empty look in his eyes that Django doesn’t like seeing at all.

“No. Haven’t really been…it’s not a hunt. I’ll find someone when I find them.” Django shakes his head. “Haven’t even been with anyone since ’72. Nice Thai woman who’d married into a northern Vietnamese family, and then the bastard had to go and die on her about two years into the marriage.”

“How rude of him,” Éoghan says dryly.

“Éoghan.” Django waits until Éoghan is looking at him again. “Get the fuck out of the military, Kid. Ditch the department and find something else to do with your life.”

“Hypocrite,” Éoghan replies. “You’re still Special Forces. Who the fuck are you to tell me what outfit I need to get out of?”

“Nobody, I guess. Just someone who’s looking at a friend and seeing that he’s about a bullet away from breaking, and I don’t want it to happen.”

Éoghan winces. “Fair enough. Fuck it—you want to get really shit-faced with me, Django Whetū?”

“I’m buying us something that doesn’t taste like pine tree piss.” Django manages to smile. “But sure. Sounds like a good way to kill another evening.”

Django has no idea what Sally sells him, but it kicks like booze used to before the program fucked up his life. He remembers making it about halfway through the bottle and then there isn’t jack shit until he wakes up the next morning in his own bed upstairs, feeling like hammered ass. His head is pounding, accompanied by a sour pit in his stomach; his mouth tastes like ashtray leavings and liquor gone foul.

“Motherfucker.” Django rolls over and finds a glass next to his bed that doesn’t have booze in it. It tastes like the best clean water he’s had in months that didn’t pour down from the sky. Another half-hour after that, he can stand and get dressed without puking on the floor.

As he’s putting on his t-shirt, it finally dawns on him that the room smells like sex. Django pauses mid-motion, trying to remember what the hell happened. He gets a grand total of almost nothing—he’s pretty sure he kissed someone at one point.

He checks his wallet, which has plenty of đồng notes from gambling and embedding knives in the ceiling, but he still has his last two American ten-dollar bills. He didn’t hire a prostitute, then. Whoever it was, Django hopes they enjoyed themselves, because he doesn’t remember a damned thing.

When Django goes downstairs, it’s still early enough in the day that the bar doesn’t have customers yet. One of Sally’s brood, a teenage boy about fourteen years old, waves to get his attention. “You! Wettu!”

Django rolls his eyes. “Not Wettu! Whetū. _Vhet-oo_. I don’t fuck up your name, Xuan.”

“Sorry, Vheh-too,” Xuan says. “I have letter for you. Mother say Ginger leave it here.”

Django feels his shoulders slump. “Stupid fuck’s gone, isn’t he?”

“Ginger gone, yes,” Xuan confirms. “He use radio, apologize much, and go.” The kid holds out a folded piece of lined paper that was torn out of a cheap notebook. “For you. Tip first?”

Django gives the kid half of the đồng from his wallet before Xuan hands over the letter. “Extortionist.”

Xuan grins and gives him a thumbs-up. “You bet!”

“Good for you.” Django takes the note over to a table, far away from the bar, and sits down to read.

 

_Django,_

_Yes, I’m a coward. I’m really sorry I didn’t stick around, but I thought it was less awkward this way._

_You say I need to get out of the military? You’re right. But it’s been my life for twenty-four years now, Django. Where would I go? What would I do? I have one skillset, and that skillset usually involves making people dead. Not good on a _résumé.__

_I don’t know if you’ll hear from me again. I don’t know what the department’s plans are, or where I’ll be three days from now._

_It probably won’t matter. So much has all blurred together. What’s one war-torn country from another?_

_Sorry, that was a terrible rhyme. Pretty sure I’m still pissed._

_You’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had, Django. I hope you take your own advice. Get the hell out of the military and find yourself a good life._

_—Éoghan_

 

Django scowls and crushes the letter in his hands, turning it into a little ball before he throws it across the room. Damned kid! He’s probably never going to see the stupid bastard again. If Django’s right about the way the man was acting, Éoghan will probably be dead inside of a decade.

He takes a deep breath and rests his head in his hands. He knows without even having to try for it that he isn’t going to be able to track Kellagh-Ambrus. He’s too good at hiding when he doesn’t want to be found.

After Django calms down, he retrieves the balled-up note. He unrolls the thin paper and spreads it back out, smoothing it as best he can, before he folds it up and tucks it into his wallet.

Kellagh-Ambrus is right. Django really does need to get the hell out of the military. He’s had enough of this shit to last several dozen lifetimes. 

**Author's Note:**

> This will likely see an editor's pen before it publishes in paper format.


End file.
